The Ideal Plan

     Hard to believe we are leaving for the Antarctic in just three days (and Rich leaves for the Arctic tomorrow)! We have all been quite busy with packing and figuring out last-minute details. Last night I stared at a huge pile of long-sleeved shirts, thick fluffy coats and wool socks wondering how I was going to cram it all into my suitcase. I decided to procrastinate by taking a trip to the store to buy a more things to add to the pile. Perhaps that wasn’t the brightest idea, but better to be prepared!

     This morning we all sat down to chat about our scientific plan of attack. We have fairly ambitious goals so it’s very important that we have an efficient plan! Our two priorities are collecting crabs and getting a good number of images at each depth (although we have various other side-projects). 

     With this in mind, we have talked about kicking off our 9 science days with a photographic transect or two in order to stake out a good place to drop our crab pots. Once we have found a king-crab sweet spot, we will drop the pots to the sea floor and leave them there for several days. While king crabs are (hopefully) crawling into our baited traps, we will steam around collecting more images of the Antarctic shelf and slope using our underwater camera, SeaSled.  This is the ideal plan, but a lot of what we do will depend on how much ice we encounter. As such, we have worked out several backup plans and are hopefully ready for whatever curves Antarctica has to through at us!

-Steph